Ramping up for the 2012 U.S. elections, Pandora became the latest Internet publisher to announce it will begin accepting political ads. The streaming Internet music service follows in the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter. The targeted local and national personalized ads will be served to voters during the audio breaks based on their ZIP code entered at registration.

Long before "Freakonomics" revealed to a larger audience just how fascinating sports data diving can be, behavioral marketers were already expert at finding curious affinities in the data they were assembling. In fact, I remember that in the early days of Tacoda and Revenue Science's evolution, they leveraged their infamous "black boxes" as audience discovery engines. In the process of targeting specific segments in their early campaigns they were also finding that unexpected segments of consumers were responding especially well to the messaging. And so one of the value propositions of behavioral targeting soon became its ability to ferret out …

comScore has begun to validate eXelate's audience intent data. Measuring the audience segments mean comScore compares the data to its panel and score it according to a five-point rating scale based on the accuracy of a brand's targeting assignments. A five-point score represents 85% to 100% audience accuracy.

I am a sucker for a good eye-tracking study. Give me a heat map showing what and in what order and for how long people look at items on a screen, and I see a window into a mode of behavior that almost always reveals something of value. "Eyes don't lie," quips Jeff Bander, Senior Vice President, Client Relations, EyeTrackshop. Understandably, that is the adage that reigns over a metrics group devoted to the value of the gaze. They have pioneered a cheap and highly scalable way to conduct eye-tracking studies with hundreds of people from their own desks using …

Marketing strategies built on consumer behavior requires data to support targeting decisions. But a study led by Lauren Freedman and e-commerce consultancy e-tailing group reveals just 8% of the 110 retail marketer surveyed plan to spend more on retargeting and behavioral targeting services during the holiday season and into 2012.

The high-tech systems that have been adding layers of data and real-time operations to the publishing and advertising markets in recent years also cake on additional costs and a comic level of complexity. Media buying has become so complex and algorithmic that agencies are looking for math majors. Executives wonder where the money is going as each new tech piece adds to the CPM. The problem is acute for a publisher like Financial Times, where a complex metered access model has to serve un-registered, registered and paid members differently, and those interactions render mountains of demo, behavioral and ad performance …

On Wednesday, Simpli.fi CEO Frost Prioleau said the company will begin to target consumers on real-time bidding inventory per impression immediately after a search. He said early tests show this feature provides four to 10 times the conversions created by traditional 30-day search retargeting. The company also will provide reports, so advertisers can see exactly how their search retargeting campaigns perform throughout the process.

Email marketing company LiveIntent CEO Matt Keiser says that he has been dreaming of the day he could serve highly targeted ads dynamically in real time into emails since he founded his previous email company Datran many years ago, but the technological limitations hampered him. He wanted email ad units to behave with the same kind of flexibility as networked Web advertising. He learned that the absence of reliable cookies or Javascript in the platform limited his ability to do the kind of real-time ad serving that could recognize and respond to parameters like place, date and time. With LiveIntent, …

Dudley Fitzpatrick, along with JAGTAG co-founder Jason Alan Snyder, updated a U.S. patent application this month filed in June 2011 for "Apparatuses, Methods And Systems For Anticipatory Information Querying And Serving On Mobile Devices Based On Profiles." The application describes a method to use a code-triggered information server to serve content, demographics and behavior-targeted information to users via mobile devices.

Cash-strapped, house-poor, expecting a double dip, American consumers are facing the holiday shopping season with some dread this year. According to a new survey by SteelHouse, which retargets shoppers based on shopping personalities as well as buying behaviors, 82% of us say we will change our shopping behaviors this season. Half of us will do comparison shopping more often and 62% say we will spend less overall. But the key beneficiaries of our cash crunch is digital media.